On 11 December, we celebrated the official launch of Grattan Institute’s 2025 Prime Minister’s Summer Reading List at State Library Victoria.
Grattan CEO Aruna Sathanapally was joined by ABC politics and economics journalist Tom Crowley and acclaimed author Cordelia Fine for a lively discussion, as we unveiled our selection of six of the most thought-provoking, compelling, and relevant books of 2025.
It was an extraordinary year, and these are extraordinary reads – not just for the Prime Minister, but for anyone passionate about public policy and Australia’s future.
Transcript
Tom Crowley: Good evening and thank you very much for coming. We’ll get started in just a moment. And, if I can begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land that tonight’s event is on the Wurundjeri, Woi Wurrung, and Boon Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation and pay respects to elders, past and present, and any First Nations people present today.
It’s a great pleasure to be back here in Melbourne, and to be back at the Grattan Prime Minister’s Reading List event. I’m Tom Crowley, a political reporter at the ABC, but in a past life, I was a Grattan employee and in a past life I was a, a Grattan enthusiast as an economics student at the University of Melbourne.
And the Prime Minister’s Reading List has been, I think it’s fair to say now, a bit of an institution, in, in Melbourne and I think in Australian public policy circles for some time now. It’s been well over a decade. Sad to say that I think we have only one Prime Minister confirmed whoever actually read one of the books on the list.
And no prizes for guessing that that one was Malcolm Turnbull, who I’m told, Lucy Turnbull, former Grattan Institute board member used to buy the books. For the others, maybe not so much, but really these lists have never been quite so much about the literal Prime Minister and what he or she might read on the summer break.
And more about all of us, the people who work in politics, whether as journalists, policy analysts, and all the rest. And those of us who follow it closely, care about the big political issues that shape the nation. the list of books that any one of us might wish to read on our summer breaks is the good staff at Grattan opportunity to give us their reflections on the political tides that have shaped this year and the ones that might shape next year.
And some of the books on this list, just like every year, have a very direct and obvious link to some of the big political issues. Of 2025, and some of them are rather abstract. There’s a fine tradition of fiction and all sorts of other things appearing on the Grattan list, but every one of these books that we’ll talk about this evening, I think in one way or another, speaks to the political moment and to some of the issues that the Grattan Institute is confronting.
It’s been a big year in federal politics shaped of course by the resounding re-election of the Albanese government. And I think the first time it’s safe to say this century that a government has been re-elected, with enough political capital to focus on some of the deep structural issues that make Grattan and the extended Grattan universe very excited.
As much as there is a conversation about whether the Albanese government is sufficiently ambitious on a variety of domains, it is at least clear that it’s interested in talking and thinking about some of the challenges that Grattan has spent a lot of time talking and thinking about the housing crisis and the energy transition chief among them.
But Australia’s productivity problem, another one on that list. And so, whether this government, can take advantage of the moment that it finds itself in, whether it can start to shift some of those structural problems is a very important question for people, who work at the institute and are interested in its work.
But there’s something else going on as well. Of course, in politics, storm clouds gathering on the horizon, whatever dramatic imagery you want to use, there is a sense that some of the incremental policy debates that Grattan and others have as worthy as they are, are not the main game, at least when we look around the world, the liberal democratic underpinnings that are on the front page of every Grattan report in the acknowledgement section.
And that really are the basis for so many of the policy conversations that we have here at Grattan and the ABC. And in Australian political circles, well, we’re actually starting to wonder whether that ship will, stay afloat at all. A lot of advanced democracies are not sure what they think about liberalism or democracy.
When we look at the global economy, we see countries turning away from one another. And when we talk about our social fabric, as some of the books on tonight’s list will encourage us to do, we also see some signs of strain. And so those. Macro dramas are playing out as we talk about issues like housing and the energy transition.
And I think this is, as someone who took no part in its formation, an excellent list, that gives us a chance to look at all of these issues. And so, with that, it’s time to bring in my companion for this evening and the Grattan chief executive Aruna Sathanapally. Aruna, welcome and thank you for having me.
This is, I think. Your second Prime Minister’s reading list as CEO in your first event?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yes, that’s right.
Tom Crowley: Was it a daunting task?
Aruna Sathanapally: It, look, it is a daunting task, and I’ll confess something that to be on a stage in a state library talking about books, turns out to be an anxiety point. So go gentle with me.
As a, as a, as you know, as a self-proclaimed nerd, I’m not a literary critic, but that’s not really the, the job of the Prime Minister’s reading list. that said, the job of the Prime Minister’s reading list is pretty audacious. I think, as an outsider to Grattan coming in, I, I was struck by the audacity of, Grattan laying out a set of books and instructing the Prime Minister to read them over, you know, his or her summer holiday.
But, you know, we like to be a bit audacious. We like to set the, set the bar high. I, it did strike me this year that the Prime Minister was getting married and was likely to be on honeymoon over the summer. I had a, a brief fleeting moment where whether we could just go for a kind of romance themed reading, reading list.
Tom Crowley: Now, that would’ve made for an interesting event.
Aruna Sathanapally: It would’ve made a very, very different event. as it happens. There are, are a number of, of, of books here that pick up on, on, on themes of relations between men and women, but none of them are particularly romantic about it.
So, you know, it’s good that he’s appears to have gotten his holiday, his honeymoon out of the way first, and so he can focus on the, the serious stuff.
Tom Crowley: So, yes, speaking, I suppose speaking of the serious stuff, I mean, what, what, when you said about this audacious task of coming up with a, a list for the Prime Minister, you’re the third Grattan, CEO, to have a crack at it.
What, what makes a good book? What, what makes a book that. We’d want the Prime Minister to read versus one that we might just tell our friends to read.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. No, it’s, so we, we go through this process during the year where we, we receive books, we also seek them out. we read them, we debate them, we debate the ideas in them.
What we’re ultimately looking for, for the, the shortlist, of books is a book that has some interesting ideas to digest, not necessarily that we a hundred percent agree with. So, we don’t endorse every argument made. we might disagree with some of the propositions, but we are looking for something that, grapples with an idea that matters, has some valuable content for the Prime Minister to be aware of, but not just the Prime Minister for anyone in public policy circles to be aware of, but also.
In the context of public policy reads is a cracking good read. and that we, we enjoyed reading and we, we recommend other people read to inform themselves. but also, you know, it is summer. We do have a companion list, Tom, that you’re aware of.
Tom Crowley: The Wonks’ List, which has always been my favourite. Can you, can you explain that a little bit for new players?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. So, the Wonks list is the place where we put the things that, you know, they might not be a beach side read. there might be a little bit, a little bit more, academic, you know, many books on the list will have references, you know, to sources which we like. but the wonks list books will lean more heavily into maybe inline references to academic literature.
So, the wonks list is for the, the deep, the deep, policy tragics and includes like journal articles, but it does include a couple of books. So, this year we’ve got them and the table as well.
Tom Crowley: Yes, as a, as a sort of badly reformed wonk. Now trying to masquerade as a mainstream political journalist, I’ve snuck a couple of the wonks books on here, and so we’ll get into the weeds, as we go through the evening.
But let’s dive in. And the first on the list is Ben Chu’s, exile economics, Ben Chu, A BBC journalist who has written a book really about one of those things that I alluded to in my dramatic opening monologue. And that is that countries are turning away from one another and from the global trade system that has underpinned, a lot of the growth in prosperity over the last few decades.
Choose argument essentially is that this isn’t new, but that every time it bubbles up in human history, the tendency to turn inward is a harmful one. So very much in the classic vein of economic thinking on this front, but two takes us through soybeans and silicon chips and a lot of the modern interconnected supply chains that make it such a fascinating question of what it will mean if we turn away from each other on a trade front.
So really interesting book in, in a broad sense, what was it about this Aruna that made it stand out for you?
Aruna Sathanapally: So, each year we try and have a book that, is an economic book that speaks to economics, but economics not for a trained economist, economics for a person who is actually interested in the world that we live in.
And an explanation of it that speaks to. Well, ultimately, we want our economy to achieve for us. and one of the things I really like about this book is that, you know, it’s, it, it’s, it’s very careful, it’s very nuanced. It’s also quite human. And I think that that’s one of the, you know, the pain points sometimes for economics, is that, that we, you know, us economists don’t necessarily speak in a language that is, is about human values.
But, you know, bench who both starts and finishes with, with quite a, a human story to me, that he starts with this enduring appeal of self-sufficiency, and anchors it in the idea that there’s a reason that this keeps, this idea keeps coming back. Right, there is something. And, and he, he tracks how, rich countries and poor countries leftwing, parties and right-wing parties, you know, you find this idea all over the place.
He names it exile economics. It’s this idea of like retreat and the idea that you are not just better off, but somehow, better morally. You can stand on your own two feet, and that there’s a, you know, there’s a strength on the other side of that, even if there’s pain to get there. and that’s a dangerously appealing idea because I think many of us can fall into that trap of being like, oh, well there’s, there’s a, there’s a strength to this, even if it might be bump bumpy on the, on the road, and there’s painful on the road.
But what he does is he goes through, quite, you know, carefully and in a, just a really reasonable tone and, and sets out why. There’s really just, just the pain. There’s no strength on the other side. there’s no, there’s no sort of, greater form of prosperity or morally better society on the other side of, of pulling back from the world.
Tom Crowley: It, it is a, you know, it’s a really well written book and a, and a really easy book for, for general readers. I think so, you know, in that sense, the, the journalists touch, I suppose is, is evident and, and the theme of self-sufficiency. The desire for countries to be self-sufficient runs throughout it. And I think when we listen to debates in the US and the UK and even some of the way that China is thinking about its own economy, we can see that impulse for self-sufficiency.
It’s slightly different though, I think in Australia because, I mean, you know, Australia is very rarely the main character in these sorts of books that are talking about the world economy. But we can see the echoes in this of some of our own debates. But it, one thing that struck me when reading it is that in Australia it’s, it’s less about so much being self-sufficient in the sense that we might want to produce all of our food or produce all of our kind of critical, you know, manufacturing items.
But more about the phrase, I guess is sovereign capability. The buzzword at the moment, Australia seems to have this preoccupation with. Building some of all of the things that really matter, building at least some solar panels, having at least some critical minerals capability, not wanting to relinquish, completely any of these things.
Andrew Hasty and his automobiles come to mind. Is that an Australian variant of exile economics? And as an economist, what, what, what’s your view on the future Made in Australia? All of these conversations about. Sovereign capability in Australia.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. Look it a couple of reflections. one of the things that, that the book points out is that, even though it might seem absurd that we would pull back from the global economy and at, at scale, and he, he points out that it’s, it’s that global trade has sort of stagnated.
It hasn’t gone backwards, you know, yet. he says the reason you should take the risk of Exile Economics seriously is that it’s a spiral. And so even if you’re not the initiator, you might find yourself living in a world where other people are engaging in, in the behaviour of pulling back. And that threatens your supply chains, that threatens the way that you can conduct yourself.
It’s, it’s hard for us to be an, an open economy if nobody else is, is open. that doesn’t mean that we should respond by closing our economy, but it does mean we need to think about contingencies. but. There’s, there’s a, there’s a difference between being sort of smart positioning and, self-sufficiency.
Smart positioning might mean like diversifying the people that you are engaging in trade with. it might mean stockpiling critical things, mapping the things that you can do and the things you can’t. It might mean taking a bit of a hit and doing a few things that you’re not as good at, but it probably doesn’t mean trying to do stuff that you’re bad at.
And I think that’s the, the difference between thinking about our critical minerals, thinking about our supply chains versus we need to bring back car manufacturing. it’s not clear that there’s anything particularly morally or, otherwise necessary in terms of bringing back car manufacturing to Australia.
And we know that that’s not something we’re very good at. And so, I think he’s, he’s got quite a nuance take there. It’s not that there isn’t a problem that, you know, countries, even countries like Australia need to grapple with, that the world is more volatile and we need to be prepared for, something that’s not the first best.
Global free trade. But the smart way to do it is, not to try and onshore everything yourself, but to actually potentially, create new relationships with people. And one of the things he points out is that there’s a lot of opportunity for that, that countries tend to actually trade with a small number of partners.
Again, that makes sense. Like usually through historical relationships. So, there’s actually a lot of opportunity for countries to trade more broadly than they do at the moment. But that’s the opposite of pulling back. That’s actually, that’s actually leaning in and forging new relationships.
Tom Crowley: An interesting set of questions that won’t be going anywhere, so there’s plenty to think about there.
Now we’ve got a small table, so I’m going to have to dump the books on the ground here as I go through them. Moving on to Hannah Richie’s, clearing the air and, and, you know, I guess at, at risk of injecting too much spice into the conversation. I, I was a sceptic when I picked this one up. I, I’ll say that much, and that’s because I have a, a rule every time I walk into bookshops, and it’s a, a sacred principle that I had to violate on this occasion, which is that I never buy a book that has Bill Gates, as one of the quotes on the cover.
And look, you know, no offense to Bill, I’m sure it helps a lot to sell books, but I, I, I suppose my, my, predisposition, unfair though it may be, is that that generally speaks to something that’s obviously very kind of mass and global in its in its frame. And, so that’s the, the mindset that I had coming in.
But I have to say that it was, it was a very kind of detailed and. I guess straightforward book that in the end had a little bit of the Grattan about it actually. This is essentially, I mean, I won’t talk too much about it other than to say that it’s essentially 50 myths, busted, I suppose, is the way that you’d frame it.
That goes through a series of, common misconceptions as the author would put it in the climate debate and answers them in the Grattan style with graphs and some clear and punchy recommendations. And I think, you know, there’s a lot in there. Again, that’s very good for the general reader, but some good footnotes as well.
Some things that might qualify it for the wonks list and some good charts. still, I come away with a slightly overwhelming sense. I mean, it’s a book that frames itself as clearing the air, making the climate transition seem, more manageable and less daunting than you might otherwise think it. But I got to the end of it, and I thought, goodness, if we’ve got 50 myths to bust, we really do have quite a bit of work here.
There’s a lot in it. And, and I, I, I suppose even, the wonderful Grattan energy reports often leave me with this feeling. I go through every single domain of the economy, understand the scale of what a net zero transition would require and come away feeling a little daunted as a policy communicator, including in the energy space.
What do you think about how, as the social license for something this difficult slips that the task is for us and for you and for Grattan to, to be able to, I guess, hold people’s hands and, and keep the faith in what it is that you want them to do. Look,
Aruna Sathanapally: maybe I’ll start with the fact that the, the net zero transition and it’s not just, it’s, that’s to a point, that’s to 2050 and there’s some more work after that.
Got Alice and Raven, the audience here. I know that, you know, the task continues. It’s, it’s a, it’s not anything like what we’ve done before, right? It’s, it’s a transformation of our economy, but it’s deliberate, it’s intentional, and we’re doing it on, on a deadline, and all of that is essential. and there is a, there is a science and a, a set of probabilities that sit behind those timelines.
You could pick different timelines. You’ve got to be prepared to deal with much worse outcomes. that is a huge and daunting task. It is, but it is also, and, and this is Hannah Richie’s argument. It is, it is also a solvable problem. And so, you have to be able to hold the magnitude of the issue and the imperative, while also holding on to the fact that this is a solvable problem.
There are big things we need to do, but we can do them. and she wrote a, a second book actually that came out before this called Not the End of the World, and this is a follow up book to that. and it’s, it’s about staying. I think the optimism is actually a really important element of.
Effective communication in this space. And I know it’s, you know, I know there’s people who, who sometimes fret about the optimism cause they’re like, oh no guys, this is really bad. But it is really disempowering to be catastrophic. If you’re a policy communicator, you, there’s a certain amount of problem admiration you can do, but there’s only a certain amount.
You have to be able to pivot to what we can do to solve a problem. The other thing I’d say about this book is yes, like, yeah, there’s a lot of myths, but equally I read those questions and every time she got to a new one, I was like, this is a question a person should be able to ask in good faith and not feel like that.
It’s just, it’s a, it’s either a silly question or it’s an evil question. and I think that when you go to the point about social license, I think it is really important that we are able to talk about these questions in a good faith manner and say, this is the answer and let me work through that with you, as opposed to, well, I can’t believe you’ve asked me that question, like.
You know, this is far too important for us to be sitting down and talking through the, sort of the, the details of why we, why we must transition to net zero, or why that involves doing something about what we eat or why that involves these particular measures with fossil fuels. People should be able to ask and answer these questions.
So, in, in adding this to the list, I mean, one of the things we said was that it’s a great guide for those who might have these questions, and I certainly didn’t know everything in that book. but also, for you to be prepared to have those conversations with people who you want to bring along with you.
Cause I think actually, you know, we are public policy communicators as our job, but actually, so is, anyone who wants to be part of a, a, a big policy change.
Tom Crowley: There’s the, the persuading part, and then there’s the doing part. And that, I guess is another one of the things that this book steps through are just what a significant economic transition, as you mentioned as well, is required.
There’s been a fair bit of talk about the doing part in our politics and around the world this year, and it’s actually mostly due to a book that’s not on the list, and that’s a book called Abundance, which seemed to sweep through the Albanese cabinet earlier this year, when all of a sudden everyone starting with Andrew Lee, as most economic books do.
But soon everyone else said that they were reading. And, over in the United States as well, it’s become, I guess both a fad book, but also quite divisive among Democrats. as I said, it’s not on the list, but, a companion, what you might call the wonks Companion to Abundance, which is why nothing works by Mark Dunkelman.
I won’t talk much about it because we hear for the main list, not the Longs list, but it, it speaks to a similar set of issues that Hannah Ritchie’s book does. And that is both when it comes to the energy transition, when it comes to fixing cities and building more housing. The systems we’ve erected and the checks and balances that we might have put in place reasonably and with good intentions.
Hamstringing our ability to do the things that we want to do. And the Albanese government has confronted that this year through, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act, which I’ve spent far too much time talking about, and which very few people understand, but which economists know is very central.
Both to protecting the environment, but also to being able to get things built. What are your observations on a year spent talking about abundance, a year spent talking about building things? Are we any closer to unlocking the solutions to some of these intractable social problems?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. And look, it’s, it’s a line that’s in, in Hannah Richie’s book and it, it, it underpins, you know, abundance and, why nothing works.
This idea that the, you know, the, the, the environment movement has traditionally been about stopping things. How do we, how do we put in, checks and balances and how do we, how do we stop bad things from happening? but has had to pivot to, building things and doing things. and that turns out to be actually intention sometimes with some of the ways in which we’ve set up, set up environmental processes.
Cause we’ve set them up to slow us down rather than to speed us up and we need to move fast. I mean, why nothing works is interesting because, it’s like, it, it’s a terrific history of, the US progressive movement and this sort of tension between, You know, believing in government and believing in the state to do stuff, and then being actually quite sceptical of government and wanting to hold the state back.
But Australia’s quite different, right? And we, we don’t have, we haven’t had traditionally a lot of the pathologies that the US has in terms of its inability, the inability of the government to do things. we, you know, built up around a different model, a model that was much more geared towards state power coming from, from the UK.
We do have some, some checks and balances. And I think the EPBC reform was, it was definitely example of an area where our processes were slowing down our ability to reach decisions. Not, not necessarily that the decision would always be yes, the decision might be no. But if we’re going to say no, we need to reach that decision efficacious.
The, the, it, it’s been interesting though because I think abundance has become so powerful as a, as a, as a broader global call to sort of get stuff, get stuff done, even in countries that aren’t as broken as the US is. and I think it’s, it, it, it’s valuable because it, it forces us to, to think about, I think one of, one of the, one of the team at Gratton said, like, think about when we say we need to work on the supply side.
Like what does that actually mean? What do we have to do differently to be able to get the things that we want to see, see more of?
Tom Crowley: I, I’m interested in that point that, that Australia and I, I’ve heard this before, has, I suppose maybe a higher baseline level of trust that, that governments can do things and, and willingness to let them try.
Do you think that through COVID and, and I guess the general kind of crisis in confidence in governments, is that shifting here in the same way? Are, are we just sort of. Behind on the same decline as the US And, and I, I guess as a related question, I mean, how, how urgently do you think that governments of the mainstream government of the centre, I suppose, like the Albanese government has to be able to demonstrate tangible progress, demonstrate that governments actually can shift these problems?
Are we, is the hourglass running out of sand on that front?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting cause like in, in the context of why nothing works, I mean the core argument that’s made there is that, progressives tied up government so much that people lost faith with government that created the conditions for someone to come in and say.
Basically, pedal false solutions. and we don’t see, like in, in like in the Australian sort of survey data, et cetera, we don’t see, you know, a massive drop off in, in our trust levels. But I think we’re right to be wary, right? Because we’re an anglophone country, we live in a broader context. There are people who are digesting media from elsewhere, and the tone definitely has, has shifted in terms of erosion of democratic values.
Where, where I think the po the position is somewhat different is that there are specific contexts in Australia where our legal processes, or our decision-making processes hold things up, and that’s energy and housing. but actually, in other areas we don’t tend to have deeply legalistic, processes.
That means that if the government can do, can actually act on housing and can act on energy, I think we’ve got a really good shot of government being able to demonstrate that. It, it can do things, but if it doesn’t act on those two areas, like if we, if we aren’t able to get in place the renewables that we need, if we aren’t able to build the housing that we need, over the next, you know, say five years or so, I think that’s when you get to the point where I, I think that that’s the point where I’d start to be worried that people might start to think that you need a, you need a populist or you need someone who’s just going to break the system because the system is not delivering.
Tom Crowley: Well, those three books, all of them, I, I suppose they’re probably the three with the most direct relationship to politics, and that’s given us a wonderful excuse to talk about a bunch of policy issues and pretend that we’re talking about books. This one though, will be a slightly harder challenge on that front, and I suppose in some ways is a little bit of a counterpoint in its own way to, to abundance and to the economist’s way of thinking about the environment and the climate.
And that is, is a River Alive by Robert McFarland. And this, I suppose is a very different, and I, I guess unapologetically ecological. Frame for thinking about the natural environment and thinking about it on its own terms. It follows the author as he looks at three rivers around the world with three people who feel, I suppose, a spiritual and a living connection to those rivers.
And, he goes on a, a series of adventures and, and I suppose tries to connect a little bit with them himself. it’s beautifully written and I will just read a very short excerpt to give you a sense of how he approaches his task. If you find it hard to think of a river as alive, try picturing a dying river or a dead river.
This is easier. We know what this looks like. We know how it feels. A dying river is one who does not reach the sea. A dying river’s fish float belly up in stagnant pools. Swans in the upper river Thames now wear brown tide marks on their snowy chest feathers showing where they have sailed through sewage.
In the 1930s and 1940s, the Dawn River in Toronto suffered such contamination from the oil refineries on its banks that it twice caught fire and burned. In the 1990s, Lake Ontario was so chemically polluted that it was possible to develop photographic film by dipping it into a bucket of lake water. In the autumn of 2023, a funeral was held for lock nay, northern island’s biggest water body, black clad mourners bore a coffin to the shore of the lock whose water was stinking and dog killing from the toxic algal blooms that had spread across it.
Rivers should not burn. Lakes should not need funerals. How has it come to this? So that gives you a sense of, as I say, a very different way of coming at this issue. And as I was reading this, I was sort of thinking a little bit about the Grattan motto, which I think is in independent, rigorous and practical.
I never remember which order. This book you would describe with a very different outlook. It’s, it’s kind of magical and mysterious in its approach. It’s emotive in its approach. What would it mean for, for an economist and a, a Grattan employee to think of a river as a alive and to take this frame for thinking about the environment?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, it’s a look, it’s, it’s a really provocative question, right? Because I don’t know that economists necessarily always think of people as alive, right? Like we do sometimes have a tendency to, to, to turn even, even people into objects, right? And, you know, human capital is a, is a, is a good example of that.
And, and that’s really what, McFarlane’s reacting to. It’s, it’s not, it’s not that people don’t have a frame or there isn’t a kind of technocratic or modernist frame for understanding rivers. There is, but it’s very much. Thinking of it as capital that you draw upon. and the, the provocation.
And, you know, there’s a question mark in the title, right? He’s not saying a river is alive. He’s, he’s asking a question, is it? And, and, and the provocation is what would it mean if we thought about this as having a value that we wanted to endure as opposed to capital that we were looking to draw down?
Because the, the sort of the, the capital framework, assumes that there is a kind of draw down over time, right? As opposed to seeing an inherent value in preservation. for me, I think it’s really important if you’re in the field of public policy to respect that there are different ways of thinking.
Because ultimately, you know, we do public policy in a democracy and, you know, we, we are fundamentally engaged in an exercise of working out what we collectively value and what we’re going to do about it. That should be informed, it should be informed by facts and data and evidence. but fundamentally we’re making choices.
And I really liked this book for a couple of reasons. One is, it’s, you’re right, it’s beautifully written. I would’ve almost put it in the novel category cause it’s, he’s got away with words that is quite, magical. but also, it’s, it is. I think a necessary counterpoint to our, I share our enthusiasm for getting stuff done.
I really want to get the renewable energy transition done. I, I really want to break down barriers to, to housing that really matters to people. But this reminds us that there is, there is a reason we have environmental protections and that those environmental protections themselves are not perfect. And he recounts in a number of countries the extent that people go to, to try and save the environments that they live in.
And I found it quite, quite an important reminder that, when you talk about, you know, we’re going to. We are going to dam this river. In the abstract it might not seem like very much at all, but for the communities who live along that river, it is absolutely existential. I think it’s, I think it’s important in public policy to remember, you know, what, what actually matters to people, even if you have to make tough decisions in the end.
Speaker: How, how much do you think that’s a, a motivator for change? Because I mean, even in that description of, of rivers, I mean, I haven’t tried to develop photographic film in the Yarra, but it doesn’t seem outlandish that that one might be able to do that. And algal bloom, of course, reminds us, of what’s happening in Adelaide at the moment.
We’re heading into a summer where we might once again be choked with smoke from bushfires. I remember this very well. It was my first summer at Grattan where, the sky and the air was quite difficult to breathe in Melbourne and there was a sense that that would, shift public opinion a little. Not sure in the end really whether it conclusively did, how, how much does this sort of thing persuade people to, to support political action?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting cause I, I don’t, I I’m not sure it’s a political book. actually, I think it’s, it’s, it’s a book that’s relevant to policy, but I, I think it’s, it’s a book that invites us to, to reflect deeply on the how nature matters. And he’s a nature writer. and given that even our, our climate action is about ultimately saving the planet, I think it is, I think it is valuable to also reflect on the ways in which nature matters.
But he, he points to a phenomenon that’s, quite an interesting one called the shifting baseline phenomenon, which is where you have slow degradation of something that people don’t notice it. And he points to an example of like, fish and that the size of fish can get progressively smaller. But the, the people who engage in phishing don’t notice it, and they just adjust. And so, you have a loss of fish take over time, but people simply adjust. And actually, it’s one of the things humans actually do adjust to circumstances, but it means that we lose sight of the way in which we’ve, degraded the environment we live in.
And so, I think that actually aspects of climate change are an example of that. There has been a shifting baseline and we’ve adjusted to it. We’ve adjusted to hotter summers, we’ve adjusted to, to bushfires, and we, we’ve adjusted to, rain events that are more extreme. and so, I, I wonder actually, as you do, whether that sort of takes a little bit of the urgency of the action because we, we slowly, we are like a frog in a boiling pot.
Speaker: Well, we’re making good progress here. I’ll move on to what I think is number four of six on the list, and that is Jess Hill’s quarterly essay. Losing It, can We Stop Violence Against Women and Children? Now, Jess Hill’s arguments I’m sure will be familiar to many, and for those who have not read the quarterly essay, I think this is sort of a, maybe a slightly more detailed elaboration of arguments that she has made in other places.
And I think it, it has, the, the form, if not the, the topic of a Grattan report in, in the sense that this is a, a step through the evidence, a step through what works in a policy area that’s not working, and a series of pretty punchy recommendations that go to essentially a shift away from, what, what Hill describes as a kind of a, a poorly evidenced and, I, I guess too sharp a focus on.
Shifting social attitudes and expecting to be able to change a problem like this just by shifting social attitudes and instead points to alcohol. And gambling reform points to bail laws in the criminal justice system points to, I guess a number of other areas in particular, intervention with child victims of family violence and a number of quite practical things that look in the manner of a Grattan recommendation.
Like the kind of things that I think he’ll imagines that the government might be able to pick up and do tomorrow. And in fact, not just imagines, because Jess Hill was on the, the rapid response task force that was convened the last time this really shot into the public consciousness, I think it was last year or the year before.
She’s advising government and finding as many people as possible in the policy space do a, a sense of frustration that despite Goodwill, this is a policy area that seems very stuck. Why do you think that is?
Aruna Sathanapally: It’s, it, it, it’s really interesting cause as you say, she, she has taken these perspectives publicly and, and when I was reading it, I, I kind of expected her to go into battle.
Like I was going to get a kind of, you know, fiercely argued account for one side. But actually, what she says at the start is that part of the reason we’ve been stuck is because of a pitched battle between two camps and what she writes this essay in the hope of a kind of negotiated peace between the two sides.
She doesn’t suggest that social attitudes aren’t important. She says the evidence, you know, they, they clearly are, but her point is that. You can’t just tackle social attitudes and expect that that will make a difference. And you do have to, you do then have to work with the other reasons in a more direct sense why particular men commit particular acts and behave in particular ways.
And so, the details, the details really matter. Then, in, in terms of, of why it stuck. I, you’re right, like tackling the alcohol industry, the gambling industry, like those are, those are, are big and hard things. And so, I think you could make the case that, it’s easier to run a, a behaviour change campaign than it is to grapple with, with particular, strong vested interests.
But equally, I think she’s, she’s actually really measured in the essay, and she does point out that there’s, there’s a, a reason why historically, you know, those who’ve won this battle to get people to accept that. Social attitudes matter. Don’t want to lose the ground that they’ve gained, because there was a world where people used to say, oh, well, the only reason he hits her is because he’s drunk.
Well, the only reason he hits her is because he lost money on the pokies. and so, it’s, it’s the, the ne the negotiated peace between the two camps, I think is really important. One of the things she says there that I, I think, that I certainly take to heart on many of the things we work on, is that big social change is really hard.
it is, again, it’s a solvable problem. It’s like Hannah Richie’s, it’s a solvable problem, but you have to pull all the levers. and you can’t end up in a pitched battle between two camps saying, well, my solution’s better than your solution. Because actually, if you want the change, you might need to have multiple solutions to get at the full scale of the problem.
Speaker: Another one of the things that always sticks out to me about this issue is that like, like so many others, the federation seems to get in the way quite often. we have. Again, as in so many other issues, we have state governments doing a lot of the frontline service delivery. We have sort of an assortment of funding programs at federal level, but nothing overall that you could describe as a coherent system.
This is a, a pretty familiar, social policy landscape at Grattan and, you know, really across different government portfolios, the, the lack of coherence, I guess you’d say in the government’s approach here. Do we just have to sort of work around the federation, hope that enough goodwill gets us over the hump?
I mean, how, how do you overcome that issue? Yeah. If it is one.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. so, you know, you, you talked about, you know, the three Grattan principles, independent, rigorous, practical. You got them in the right order, by the way. practical, right? it is, I’d love to have a different federal structure. I, I, I, I sometimes say that if you were to design Australian, Australian Federation from scratch, you would not design.
The way that we have. and you know, after a couple of drinks, I’ll say some more choice things about the people who wrote the Constitution and what they really thought about many things and the lack of humility that they had about the decisions they have made and that we are stuck with, but we are stuck with them.
So, there are many ways in which the federation could be better, but it, it’s going to be very hard to change the, the allocation of responsibilities. What we can do is work within the systems. We’ve got to build more joined up responses. That’s, that’s definitely, that’s possible. It’s just, the sort of the grand plans of actually just cleaning this up so that one government, one level of government is responsible, is not, is not a solution.
That’s, that I think is, is we could, we could state it, but I don’t think it, it, there’s practical steps for us to, to get there. I do think that one of the things I reflected on this is that the evidence seems to support a narrow set of quite intensive interventions. For people, who are either, you know, either commit or are, are likely to, to commit domestic and family violence.
But it also relies on those people being willing to engage in those interventions. So that’s another reason why, this is, this is genuinely a difficult area because to, to, to change people’s behaviour when they are, unwilling to embark on an intensive process can be, I think, a hard thing for government to take on board.
And so, while I know we do rail against where government is stuck also, sometimes we are coming up against things that, sometimes we expect the government can solve problems that are just quite, quite hard to, to solve in the absence of that, that willingness, of the people who participate.
Tom Crowley: Well, I’ll move on now to.
The one novel on the list, and that is, I Want Everything by Dominic Amarna. Now, I think when I spoke to you, Erin, sort of a week or two ago, I confessed that I hadn’t read this one, and I wasn’t sure about it. I really enjoyed it. It was a, it was a, a sort of a propulsive read. It’s for a book that is essentially about writers sitting around talking to one another about their writing.
It was, it, it surprisingly had the character of a thriller. and I, I won’t say too much more about its plot and why I’ve given it that description, because I don’t want to give it away. but there is a lot in it. the basic frame of it is a, a young male writer today who stumbles upon a forgotten female writer from 50 years earlier, said in Melbourne.
She wrote in the Whitlam Mirror; she wrote essentially feminist literature that was the subject of a significant cultural backlash. And then she disappeared. And through some subterfuge and deception, which I won’t spoil, our young male protagonist tries to prize out some details about where she went, what happened to her story, what was behind her story.
As I say, it’s an enjoyable read, but it also, chimes with a significant anniversary that we had this year, and that’s the anniversary of the Whitlam dismissal 50 years ago because the writer in question was writing during the Whitlam mirror. And this, I suppose, takes a bit of time to reflect on that world.
And I, I guess the, the, the framing of Whitlam as the great social modernizer in Australia but looking at. A wave of backlash and the extent to which Australia didn’t change, in Whitlam’s time, and I think in, in ways that chime with the present. So, I will indulge in another short excerpt before I get you in on this er.
And that is, the, the female protagonist. in the 1970s, 16 and pregnant on the day that Harold Holt dies. Harold Holt, the swim that needed no towel. That’s a good line. What great news. It was the best I’d ever heard to take my mind off my predicament as I had begun to think of it. I poured over the reports of the tragedy, lingering over the details, such as the PM’s final order from the general store before he entered the water, peanuts, mosquito repellent, and the morning newspapers.
My father didn’t buy the official story. Dark forces were at work, the Russians and Chinese, those thugs in the Labor Party. Now under the leadership of the dreaded golf. A Prime Minister does not simply disappear. Even before Holt’s death, my father had been meeting with other concerned citizens, local burgers and bully boys to discuss Communism’s creep into the community, reds under the bed, and on the 96 tram.
And after that, well, he lost the plot. So that gives you just a little bit of a sense of the political flavour of the book. 50 years on from the Whitlam dismissal, Aruna, I mean, what, what echoes in this book do you see today?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, so look, I. Maybe one reflection. You know, we’re really in a moment, at the moment, you know, of, of thinking about what sort of big changes we could do.
I think we do need to acknowledge there was a really big policy that the Australian government put in force yesterday that, you know, is an attempt to do something big and ambitious. but you sometimes, you know, you get caught in this idea that we haven’t done anything big and ambitious for ages. And you read a book like this and remember that there was a period in where Australia did a lot of things all at once that stuck, you know, we, we talk about the things that didn’t stick, but, you know, you go through the, the list of things that happened during this era. things we take for granted now, like no fault divorce. And that’s one of the themes, right? That’s one of the, the points of grievance, that particular, you know, people have is the introduction.
These really big social reforms. and there wasn’t consensus on them. I think it’s easy to look back and be like, oh, well obviously everyone supported them, but they, they didn’t. so, there was a government that was able to. Push through a lack of consensus, whatever you thought about that, they pushed through a lack of consensus and the reforms they made are now taken for granted.
So that was one of the things that certainly, you know, resonated with me when I was reading it, that maybe we can do things and, and know that in 50 years’ time people will look back and be like, oh, well obviously they did that because it was, it was the right thing to do. but the backlash element is really, is really interesting.
And we don’t want to spoil the book in any, in any fashion, but, one of, one of the aspects of the story does grapple with, how, you know, basically the manosphere of 19, you know, the 1970s, very different, not congregating online, congregating in community halls. Really, really angry, men, and, and furious at, at women, through this period of change.
Which I think, you know, we, we’ve got a, a, a book on the, on the wonks list that deals with the kind of the contemporary version of, of this, this idea of. you know, it’s the, the male complaint.
Tom Crowley: Yes. I should introduce this at this point, the Male Complaint by Simon Copland, an Australian academic, history really of, of the manosphere and a I, I suppose a, an attempt at a, a scholar’s look at, at where it came from and, and a more detailed look maybe than, than some of us might have.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, I, I found the manosphere really hard to read. it’s just, I think it, I’m definitely in the bucket where I, I’m sort of avoidant and on, on what people might say on the internet. but it’s, it, it does the job so that everyone else doesn’t have to of sort of researching the, the forums and the, the, the various spaces.
You know, we, we describe colloquially as the manosphere bit where you’ve, got, groups of men who have, you know, deeply anti-women views and that forms a point of a community for them. And that’s actually, one of the points that he makes is that the manosphere didn’t create. misogyny or, or, or, you know, contempt of women, that’s been enduring.
it’s, it’s just the contemporary manifestation of that in a, in a particular way. but it was, it was interesting for me to see, to, to reflect upon the backlash that is existed to previous reforms and the idea that there’s this kind of enduring, enduring vehicle for it, but that it’s now, the ways in which people can congregate are much more present to them at a day-to-day level.
They don’t have to go to a community hall, to have the conversation about, you know, exactly what they think about their wife. They can now, engage in that on a daily basis with a group of people that they’ve never met. but what, what the author points to is that that’s ultimately driven.
If you’re asking why, why are they there? It’s driven by that need for connection for someone to listen to them for, for community,
Tom Crowley: How much, I mean, you know, is this. I suppose the, the manosphere becomes more of a, a talking point in the culture. You know, coming back to the, the practical in independent, rigorous and practical.
You know, Grattan has been writing about female workforce participation, and we’ll come back to this subject in a moment, but talking about, you know, gender equality broadly defined for a while now, and the cultural climate in which that conversation is happening has been changing all a while. And as you say, the visibility of the backlash to that has increased significantly.
And in other countries, you know, quite impactfully, how, you know, from the perspective of someone who’s still writing and advocating for that same set of public policies, does, does the emergence of this kind of, you know, angry resistance rather than a maybe a simmering quiet resistance, does it change the way you think about Gratta’s role, the sorts of things that you’re advocating for, particularly when it comes to gender?
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah, it’s, it, it, it’s interesting cause I think it’s in, actually in, in in Jess Hill’s book, she makes this, this point that sometimes the, the message that you’re putting out, you know, she covers sort of behaviour change, like changing attitudes towards women and, and campaigns to do that. How, if, if what you are focused on is improving attitudes across the population, you approach it one way.
if what you’re interested in is getting to that particular subsection of men who are likely to commit violence against women. Those men have particular characteristics, and they are unlikely to respond to, you know, a video of, you know, four mates at a pub and one of them calling the other out in the way that.
An average person would, they’ve got a particular pathology. and it’s the same in, in, in the Male Complaint, just goes into what, what are the psychological characteristics of these men? One thing I found interesting is that actually, these particular psychological characteristics exist in a, in a population.
at the moment, the manosphere is one of the places that has attracted them, but there’s, you know, he points to sort of a nihilistic, frame of mind or an attraction to violence. there’s actually a pretty high correlation between the, the men who are attracted to the manosphere and other extremist movements.
So that, that gives me pause to kind of connect it to tightly the gender because, it’s an interesting question. Why are they, why are they focusing their hostility towards women? But I don’t think it’s just about, about women. And that’s, that’s certainly what the, you know, the Male Complaint would suggest is that it’s not actually, their problem isn’t fundamentally women.
their problems may be something else. It’s just this becomes the, almost the honeypot that gives them that sense of identity and community. cause they’re also lonely. they’re also, they want, they, they want to be able to complain. They need to find an audience that will listen to that.
Tom Crowley: Well, we’re segueing now irresistibly to the last book on the pile, and that is Patriarchy Inc.
By Cordelia Fine. Who is with us this evening. So, I might invite Cordelia to come up on stage and maybe round of applause.
It sort of only occurred to me once I started sitting up on this stage and talking that this must have been a torturous way to wait for your book to come up Cordelia, because I’ve been just sort miles going down, miles going down, and we’re getting closer and closer, but we’re here now. And, having sat through sort of seven potted summaries of books from me, I think it’s probably a little bit better if we, let you tell us a little bit about this book.
But just to sort of frame the exercise, I mean the, the, the book subtitle is what we get wrong about Gender Equality and Why Men Still Win at Work. And there are sort of two schools of thought in, the debate about gender equality in, in work that you identify and take issue with. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
Cordelia Fine: Yes. So basically, this book, it was motivated by the sort of noble sensation of irritation, and my irritation came from the fact that gender equality at work, broadly speaking, is a really important topic. There are lots of gender dynamics that, that we really need to fix for a number of reasons. And yet it seemed to me that the, the conversation and the debate and the discussion about it had been kind of derailed by too influential.
But in my view, both wrongheaded sort of approaches. So, one is what I call the different but equal perspective. And this has been something that I’ve been, in a sense, grappling with for over a decade in my work. So, this is the idea that yes, we still have gender gaps in who does what, and we still have gender gaps in, you know, wages and wealth and leadership positions and so on.
But it’s not something to worry about. This is just the, these are fair arrangements and they’re just the, you know, the, the, the, the, the fair and just outcome of natural evolved differences between the sex sexes in terms of their personalities. And then the other sort of opposing side of that is what I call business case, DEI or diversity, equality and inclusion, which is, you know, the slogan for, which is something which will probably be familiar with people, where people say, oh, you know, gender equality is not just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.
And that the reason that we should put include women in the workplace is because it’s going to increase profits and. And performance. And so, in effect, we have two approaches, one of which says that the sort of gender dynamics of work are no longer a problem that we have to fix. And another that has reframed the problem as the problem of how to get more value out of women’s labour.
And it just seemed to me that neither of these are going to. Get us, you know, fixing these, these gendered gender dynamics. Yeah.
And both of these, and I should have said this at the beginning, for those who are not aware of Cordelia’s work, that, you know, your background is in, in science and you have spent a tremendous amount of your academic career sifting through the evidence on exactly these questions.
And you argue in the book that, that neither of these are really in keeping with what the science tells us about how we should think about why gender differences manifest and what we can do about them. So, can you tell us a little about that and then, and then why that leads you to some of the solutions that you propose at the end of the book?
Yeah, so in terms of, in terms of the science, I guess there’s one part of it, which was, you know, how do we think about it? You know, do we, do we trust that the market is spitting out fair returns for people’s work? And, you know, the short answer to that is no, I don’t, I don’t think so. And you know, I think most economists would, would agree with that too, that, that.
Know, markets aren’t perfect, et cetera. But just to focus on the other side of things, because you know, when you actually look at, you know, survey data for Australia and overseas, you see that there’s a, you know, really significant proportion of people who are thinking actually men and women are suited to, to different jobs.
This is suited different industries. Women have less of a taste for leadership on average. They’re more interested in, you know, caring for family and investing in family rather than in their career. And there’s quite significant numbers of people who hold these points of view. And in addition, there is, you know, a, a legitimate scientific debate going on because humans are complex or evolutionary history is something that is very difficult to study for various reasons.
And so, you know, there are different perspectives on why we still see these gender divisions of labour. In our post-industrial societies, and look, so I, I do go through the data in some might call it excruciating detail. I mean, there’s a, there’s always a tension here because, you know, you have a book, a nice pink book like that called Patriarchy Inc.
Like you’re probably going to be preaching to the converted in many cases. But, you know, as an academic, you want to lay out, you know, the reasons for you having a particular view of gender equality. And when we look at historically and cross-culturally, we look at the diversity of arrangements that we’ve had in terms of the way that we divide labour.
When we look at how contingent, sex differences between men and women are in terms of their personalities or their traits and their skills and their interests and, and their preferences, this is really difficult to square with sort of simple biological explanations that we get from an evolutionary psychologist, for example, saying, look.
It’s all, we just have to take it back to, you know, our, our ancestors way back when hunting and gathering. And these are sort of locked into our, our brains via genes and, you know, we’re just pushing at this door that’s been closed by, you know, by genes and genes and hormones. And I just think in terms as a, as a scientific explanation that that evolutionary psychology account really doesn’t cut the mustard.
Tom Crowley: And so, we end up, Erin over with some policy prescriptions as well, at the end of this book. which I, I suppose in a, in a broad sense, go to things like, I, I guess changing overall, the, the balance between work and, and leisure things. floating ideas like a four-day work week but also talking about childcare availability and more equal sharing of leave.
Why, why was it that, that those were some of the areas that you went to, as, as sort of tangible recommendations?
Cordelia Fine: So I was, in some sense, I was a little bit hesitant to put forward too much in the way of, policy because I know whenever you put forward a policy, there’s an economist that will pop up and say, no, that’ll have rebound effects.
That might be the right. I’ll come to that in a moment. Oh, right. Well, here he is. Right. Oh, I knew it. I knew it. I mean, I, in, in some sense what I wanted to do in the book is not so much but for a policy, but to say, what is it that we’re, when we say gender equality, what is it that we mean? We don’t mean we shouldn’t mean.
You know, roles that match what we imagine back in our Flintstones past. And we shouldn’t mean whatever’s going to make our shareholders richer. We should have, you know, the, I borrow from a, a political philosopher called Ingrid Benz who says, you know, gender equality in, in post-industrial societies is freedom from the gender norms that constrain our, our, our capacity to achieve wellbeing across a range of dimensions.
Health, education, being able to care, et cetera. and that’s biases, you know, that, that we get rid of these biases that undervalue work that women in particular do. So, it’s a, it’s a kind of simple. A relatively simple, definition, but it’s quite multidimensional. And, you know, we’ve been talking about this backlash, and I think particularly in a, a period where there’s this sort of anger about, you know, what about boys?
What about men? This is very much a, a, a, a definition of gender equality. That, that it includes, that includes everyone, and it includes the harms and injustices that are done to boys and men under, you know, through the, through the gender norms that are, you know, weaved through our interactions and our identities and our institutions.
But the, to come back to your question, I think the reason that I was, you know, focusing on that balance between work and care is it does feel like we’re sort of stuck. You know, we’re still stuck in a modified version of that very old breadwinner homemaker model, which I don’t really think is. working for, for anyone really.
We’ve got lots of dads who would like to be more engaged at work. We’ve got women whose talents and experiences, are not necessarily being able to flourish once they have, once they have children. And we need, you know, this is a way of creating an economy in which people have genuinely equal opportunities, both to contribute, but also to combine care and be cared for when the, when the time comes, which it comes for all of us.
Tom Crowley: Now you mentioned economists at the beginning there and with, with your indulgence. I’m going to be just a little bit cheeky because apart from being a, you know, sort of very detailed and fascinating book, it’s also a very funny book in a lot of, places. And in particular, there’s a joke in here about economists, which made me laugh, and which I might just read out as a precursor to bringing you into the conversation arena.
As it happens, economists are notorious among the social scientists. I hope you don’t mind if I tell the joke, for not letting the mess of the real world get in the way of mathematically convenient Axioms. So much so that there’s a well-known joke about it. A geologist, a physicist, and an economist are marooned on a desert island as they sit there despondent and hungry.
A tin of soup, washes ashore, following the very practical suggestions for getting into the tin, made by the geologist. Smash it with a rock and the physicist heat it until it explodes. Open the punchline. Has the economist proffer the solution? Assume a tin opener. Some economists I know find this joke funny, others don’t, but they all get it.
Can I say that I only read it because I did find it funny and I did get it. and that hopefully gives you a, a flavour of what an entertaining book this is to read, surrounded by two economists who very much enjoyed the book.
If I can bring you in Aruna, how much do, do you think that economists, I guess it comes back to some of the conversations we had earlier even about Is a River Alive do, do we do a disservice to issues like gender equality in the workplace when we don’t view them intrinsically and insist perhaps on framing them. Economically.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. So, look, there are good economists and there are bad economists, and I think that good economists do a good job of it, and bad economists do a bad job of it.
good economists recognize that ultimately what we’ve got is a framework that it’s built around a notion of value. but an economist doesn’t have an answer to what actually true value is, right? That’s a human answer. and so, whether you’re talking about nature or whether you’re talking about, well, like actually what we want out of life, an economist does not have an answer to that question, of what truly matters.
But what the tool of the discipline can do is they can help us make choices and help us make decisions. So good economics helps us make decisions. so, I actually wholeheartedly agree with you that we don’t. we don’t want gender equality so we can have a bigger economy. That’s not the reason we don’t want a bigger economy as an end in itself, for, you know, we, we want a bigger economy if we do, in the service of the outcomes that it creates for, for people.
and potentially for rivers too. You know, if we, we want to take a different framework, but, the, I think that where, where I found this quite, you know, thought provoking for me is that I have certainly engaged in the argument that this is, you know, gender equality is, is good for everyone. And using the tools of economics to explain why that’s the case.
Like why is this something that grows the pie? Why is this something that boosts productivity or boosts participation in a way that we need? I’ve done that, not because that’s my lay down argument for why to do it. I fundamentally think it’s the right thing to do. But often in, in public policy circles, and certainly in circles where, where sort of, rationalists sort of technocrats dominate.
There’s a sense of trade-offs. So, there’s a sense of like, oh, that’s lovely arna, that you want gender equality, but we also want X, Y, and Z. So how does it stack up? and it’s a false trade off. And I think that’s what the thing I’ve always found really frustrating, this idea that there’s this trade off and it’s, it’s, you’ll appreciate this articulated as a trade-off between diversity and merit.
It’s, it, it’s a false trade off. cause it presumes that the world we live in right now is, is a meritorious one, and where people with the greatest merit, get fair returns on their effort and end up in the right places. so, it’s that failure of imagination. I think that’s the bad economics, that assumption that we’re, we’re in the right place.
So, I think that there’s a complementarity actually of the, the, I think the real imperative for, for gender equality, which is to enable everyone to, to make the most of the one life we, you know, that we have. and then the economist argument that you also don’t have to trade this off, that it’s not the case, that there’s a loss on the other side of the ledger that, that someone needs to account for.
Tom Crowley: There are, however, though, you know, many examples in this book of economists, perhaps bad ones sort of getting in the way or, or perhaps also, companies using arguments that sound economic really perhaps as a pretext to do very little, maintain the status quo. I’m curious, Cordelia, as someone who observes sort of economists and their participation in, in public debate, is there a advice or feedback or perhaps, if I can put it this way, you know, what, what do you think are constructive contributions, for, for scientists to make, for economists to make, I mean, how do, how do you see a coalition of the willing, sort of working together to make the right kind of arguments?
Or is a productivity framework just incompatible with, with getting where we need to get?
Cordelia Fine: We say that some of my best friends are economists and I actually, I actually live with one, so I just, there’s not a sort of, you know, deep hostility towards the discipline. I just want to put that on the table. I think.
You know, perhaps my patronizing message for economists might be, you know, that there are other disciplines that have important contributions, to, to make to understanding these really complex problems. I mean, as Aruna has said, you know, they don’t have the answers to these questions of what really matters.
And I would love to see, philosophers maybe making, playing more of an active and public role in terms of helping us think about these issues. I remember, someone from the faculty of business in economics at Melbourne telling me that, you know, on for, you know, in preparation for the budget, the economists are all told, you know, to get media ready so they can respond to the budget.
And I was like, whoa, it’s not working in many cases, why aren’t the philosophy. Why are the philosophers, why aren’t people media calling on the philosophers to ask what they, you know, they think of the political values at play. So, you know, I think, I think that’s one aspect of it. And one of the things that I wanted to do in this book was to show how this kind of, mainstream economic framing of the way it frames it, way it conceptualize or models gender inequality, gender inequality, which does certainly have value to it.
Misses out sort of key concepts, key mechanisms. It’s not going to, it’s not the right kind of model to really help us understand and recognize how inequalities get generated, in our organization. So again, again, there sort of, this complementarity, you know, yes, we need the economic way of thinking about things, but we also, we also need other kinds of, disciplines. A really nice example of this is, so some colleagues and I, we actually put together a podcast called Working Fathers. And, and this was because we wanted, we sort of, it’s always the economists who, you know, weighing in on policy issues. So, we had a podcast about policies and working fathers and we’re like, no economists who are going to have the other disciplines and no economists.
And one of our, hi, one of our, interviewees is, Carla Paska Lee. She’s an Australian historian of families, and she made this really beautiful point, which is that, you know, it’s comfortable talking about numbers there. You know, certain things are relatively easy to measure. But when we’re talking about family policy, you know, we’re talking about some of the most intense, important relationships, our pa, our, our love that we have for our children and for our parents and for our partners.
You know, these are, these are profound experiences and they can feel embarrassing and sentimental to talk about them, but these are the good heart of what it means to be human. And, you know, maybe there should be more space in these public discussions, to, to introduce that.
Aruna Sathanapally: I would, I would also point out that, I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m an economist.
I’m also, I have another disciplinary background, so I’ll adopt that hat for the purposes of Tom’s provocation. But there, there is also a tendency, I think, within certain, certain corners of the economics profession that are quite male dominated. and it is a profession as a whole that has, it’s, it’s got some gender segregation issues, that to substitute personal experience and personal views, as, as universal, because there is so much space for assumption.
And because fundamentally it’s a social science, again, good economics, interrogates, some of those, those presets that underpin, notions around value. But I certainly found, you know, in my time I spent a decent amount of time in a, in a treasury. there were many long-term treasury economists who had some very deep seated views around what women wanted to do, really, that were really based around their partners and, you know, that, that they didn’t ever bother really interrogating, but would have very, very strong views on.
And so actually it wasn’t even that, it was economics that founded their views. They were just, their kind of, their priors. but I think there’s, there’s been a lot of work, to sort of interrogate those priors and make economics a lot better at answering these questions. and unearthing some of its own biases.
I think a lot of the work around unpaid care is a really great example. cause why is it unpaid? You know, actually just asking that question because we leave it out of our, our economic statistics. but it means we miss rather a lot. And the, the disinterest in it for me is quite telling. I think that that’s where I, finding those corners, that, that traditional economics has been disinterested in is actually a good way of finding the space for us to do better.
Cordelia Fine: Yeah. And, and there are, there are wonderful economists who are doing, using the tools of their discipline to, to bring light things like Leonora Reese at the University of Canberra. And she’s published a, a paper kind of just basically quantifying the contribution to the economy of the unpaid labour and how much it would actually cost if we, if we were to, to pay it.
So, and, and that’s of course part, part of a long tradition of, of, you know, feminist and female economists going, hang on a second. Not sure about that. So, yes.
Tom Crowley: Now I want to leave some time to ask a couple of questions from the audience, but I’ve got one last one first because I, the thing that you mentioned earlier about.
Budget and media training but also sort of podcasting and that kind of thing. One of the themes I think, that’s come through a lot of these books is this question about how scientists, economists, experts, can communicate persuasively with the public and whether even that’s part of their role. I know speaking about my own time at Gratton, that was a tension we grappled with a lot.
How much were we just writing really for decision makers? And how much were we actually writing to persuade the public? Could we really set ourselves to do that? in your own academic career, there’s also been that balance between sort of, you know, academic work within the sphere of academia, but, you know, quite a few now books that are public consumption targeted at a broad audience and seeking to persuade.
How have you found the balance between those two things and how do you conceive of your role as a scientist engaging in public debate?
Cordelia Fine: Oh, that’s a great question. I mean, I, I enjoy it. I do it, because I really enjoy. Trying to convey. I mean, you can imagine the challenge, hmm, I’ll write a book about patriarchy and I’m going to make it funny.
You know, like, that was a challenge, but I thought everyone’s so bored of this subject, you know, let’s, let’s try and make it interesting and light and, and, you know, hopefully has have, you know, moments of levity in it. There as an academic, there are always tensions between, you know, really going into the weeds and the, and the deep, you know, the sort of more wonk style stuff.
And then but also trying to keep it accessible and finding that balance. I think that’s always diff difficult. And of course it’s a, it gets even more intense when you’re not, you don’t have a whole book to explain what you want to do, and you just have, you know, 10 minutes or 20 seconds or whatever it might be.
I was just telling one of your colleagues that when I had media training, she asked me a question, I started to answer. I’d only just got going. And she like, I’m going to stop you there, Cordelia. Someone asks you a question, they don’t want a lecture. I was like, okay. Right. I need to recalibrate a bit. So, it is challenging and I, I don’t think all academics should have to do it.
It’s just not doesn’t suit some of them. And I think that’s okay. We can all contribute in different kinds of ways, but I think for those academics who can, I think it’s such a great thing to do because there’s so much popular crap out there on important topics that it does help if there are people who actually have some expertise and have thought of things and read the research and the evidence to, you know, to, to, to try and make things accessible. So great.
Tom Crowley: Well, we’ve got a few minutes left, so I will try and take perhaps two or three questions from the audience. I think we’ve got a microphone that’ll go around, so I’ll sort of go by, show of hands if, if anyone’s got them or else we might need to call on a couple of Grattan plants here. We’ve got one there.
Question: Thanks for the excellent discussion. I was really interested, particularly with the first book, whether, whether there’s anything there that correlates with closing borders to people as well as closing borders to trade.
Tom Crowley: There is, in fact, and I was meaning to talk about it, but I was conscious of time.
There is a whole section on migration and Aruna, I’m, I’m, maybe I’ll, I’ll get you to reflect on the question that I was going to ask on that front, which is the book does talk about turning away from. Sort of, I guess I was about to say trade in people. That’s, that’s not, that’s a very economist way of describing it.
But, but migration,
Aruna Sathanapally: You’ve just made them objects. Right?
Tom Crowley: And what that means for, for economics. and, and, and the, the turn in wood. So maybe just briefly, given, given, we’re pressed for time, some reflections on Australia’s migration debate in, in the context of exile economics.
Aruna Sathanapally: It’s, it, it’s so interesting, right?
Cause there’s a chapter in, in the, in the book that specifically refers to people, and talks about how impossible it would be for us to do so many of the things we want to do without people being able to move. now mindful that this, like, that isn’t the only reason you support people being able to move, like freedom of movement is actually a really human thing.
And it is actually a fundamental right, that you are able to leave, leave a place and live in a different place, at least within a country. but the economic evidence is fairly clear that there’s a very substantial economic payoff. from, from migration. and that’s, that comes from, from skilled migration.
It, it also comes from, business formation by migrants. So, you know, Ben, she lays it out. He’s like, this is what you lose if you want to shut those borders and some things you won’t get to have at all. So, he makes the connection between the desire to sort of onshore semiconductor processing. And he is like, well, you can onshore semiconductor processing or you can close borders, but you can’t do both of those things because if you want to onshore that thing, you need to bring in a whole lot of scientists from other countries.
And so, there’s this tension actually between some of the aspirations to, to, to do more complex things or, or build things, but also not want those people over there to be involved in it. That is just, you can’t unpick that. You’re just going to have to make some choices. But what he did say is that. Notwithstanding the evidence being fairly clear, a lot of the myths around migration, like suppressing wages or causing crime, which are myths, they’re not backed up by evidence, have remained quite persistent because what’s at play is a type of, often a type of cultural anxiety.
And that comes back to the idea that like, actually, you know, some of these arguments are often fighting against a, a, a sort of a sentiment that people might have, that isn’t actually about what’s going to be best for growth or what’s going to be best for living standards.
Tom Crowley: Couple more questions. Anyone? Oh, we’ll go there and then here to my brother who’s gratefully put his hand up.
Question: Thank you. I’m not a plant. It’s a light-hearted, it’s a light-hearted question. So, out of the books that you’ve discussed this evening, which would be the one that you would most recommend to the Prime Minister to read this summer?
That is a good question. Pretend I’m not here.
Tom Crowley: Well, apart from, patriarchy or may maybe, Maybe I’ll flip the question back to you, Cordelia, listening to the discussion. Which of these books do you most want to read? And then I’ll think of my answer.
Cordelia Fine: Well, I’m really interested in the exile economics, but I’ve already, I, I’ve, I mean, Jess Hill’s losing an essay is incredible, powerful, persuasive piece of work.
And I’ve, I’m halfway through. I want everything, which is great, great fun. And speaking of someone who writes in Melbourne, I thought I was laughing out loud at some, at some points, but I’ll let, I’ll let the more serious form the answer go.
Aruna Sathanapally: Oh, I, I, look, I’m going to make a confession. I’m a fiction reader, by disposition.
So, that would be like, I want, everything is excellent. It’s such a great, it’s such a great book. Dominic Amare is a sort of first-time, first-time novelist, so I think everyone should go buy a coffee. but if I was to pick one of the, the nonfiction books, is A River Alive is just a, like, it’s it was almost a meditative read. I think it would be an absolute joy to read over summer.
Tom Crowley: I’m going to be a little bit more cynical and, draw on my, press gallery, hat and say that, my observation of the Prime Minister is that perhaps, less so than some of his ministerial colleagues, is he interested in, questions about the economy, questions about productivity.
So, I think he would benefit from perhaps even just abundance as the starter book. But why nothing works, I’ll, I’ll give him something on the wonks list because I do observe a, a, a tension there between someone who, you know, I think reads plenty of sort of fiction and high level things, Albanese, but, I, I’d like just a little bit more wonk from him.
So, I’ll, I’ll make that my cheeky answer. we’ve got, well time for probably actually one or two more questions. So, I’ll go have you got a microphone? Yeah.
Question: Thank you. G’day Tom. Just to your point about, companies, pursuing representation cause it’s profitable. I wonder if you can make the same observation post-election and the liberal wipe out, particularly amongst women, sort of putting women in positions of power and politics because it’s intellectually, expedient, and not intrinsically because of a commitment to equality.
Cordelia Fine: Hmm. Yeah. So that’s a, that’s an interesting question. So, my book doesn’t, yeah, it doesn’t, touch on political representation. And I, I think that’s an interesting one because in some ways, you know, the argument for the idea that, you know, a country shouldn’t be run by a group of people that do not reflect the community that they’re serving is a bit more established than, than it is in the, in the business world.
Even though of course, business is so powerful and influential and it, it sorts of influences what kind of products and services we have and who they, who they serve and so on. but yes, there is a, there’s a sort of maybe a common issue here of, it’s not a genuine commitment to creating environments that are fair and, respectful for everyone, but kind of airdropping in, women.
And one interesting, there was a really interesting study done where first of all, they found that business case, arguments were dominated in the Fortune 500. But additionally they found that when you ask members like, you know, women in STEM or racial minority groups, you know, show them this business case diversity case versus a fairness one, and you ask them, which organization would you rather work for?
Like, they’d actually rather work for the one that doesn’t want to have, have them because they’ll make more money out of them. But the one that because they want to be, cause they want to be fair. so, I. You know, there’s, there’s a sense that these pe people, even the intended beneficiaries of these statements are, I’m a little bit offended about this.
I’m worried that you’re stereotyping me, that you’re going to treat me as interchangeable with other women, and that you’re going to exploit me to try and try and make me look good. And I think, you know, we are, we’re a bit, we’re all a bit smarter than that. So, one does have to worry about just airdropping women in to look good.
It just feels like a form of virtue signalling. And of course, you’re leaving all the, you know, part-time work, mothers or women in low paid insecure jobs with pure bad promotion and training opportunities. Like, you’re not worrying about that. You’re just, you’ve got the highly visible women or, you know, representation up there.
So, you know, we, we need to look past these, these, these kinds of optics, I think. And I think often we do, we, we are quite cynical about them. Did you want to add anything on that or maybe fit one more question in too.
Aruna Sathanapally: Yeah. look, it, it, it’s an interesting one because while you’re right that I think in, in political representation, the idea that your representative body doesn’t look like your population strikes most people as not the right outcome.
Not from an instrumental perspective of like, how we get better policy, but because you’re like, well, the whole job of this. Representative body is to represent us. but I do think that there’s a bit of an, an interplay and you know, you, you, you mentioned it in the book with this idea that there’s like, there’s particular things that women can bring.
Like it just needs a, it needs a bit of a woman’s touch. always, always rankles me. cause it, it falls back into precisely the types of stereotypes that we’re trying to combat, combat, combat that actually, you know, if you had a woman do that, you’d get a different, you’d, you know, you’d get a, a different flavour of policy.
And that’s not wrong from the sense that you might look at something you otherwise didn’t work, pay attention to. But it does sometimes then tip into some, you know, fairly tired stereotypes around. And it’s the same thing in the kind of business case version that, you know, you’ll get a different communication style, et cetera, and look to some extent empirically you might, but you want to be really careful that you’re not, falling into, saying we want this, this many people with this characteristic and this many people with that characteristic.
When, as you say, the science on that is pretty weak.
Tom Crowley: Right. Well, maybe one more question. I can see a hand just on the end there.
Question: My question’s for Cordelia primarily, I’d love to hear about, how you wove humour through your book, and the role that that plays in tackling really complex and very serious topics.
Speaker: Well, as my partner, attests, I was just a bundle of joy when I was writing the book. yeah, there’s this, there’s this wonderful cartoon and unfortunately, I can’t remember who created it, but it is got this little, you know, little squares of a writer and she writes something and she goes, yeah, that’s funny.
No, it’s not funny. Yes. No, that’s definitely funny. It’s not funny. Yes, it’s funny. And yeah, it’s funny and you know, there’s like, it’s, all that sort of work and 10 tension that goes into trying to work out whether or not something, something is funny. So, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of hard actually.
It’s, as, you know, it’s, it’s working as much as doing the, doing the research and weaving in the arguments is, but again, it’s sort of like, as I said, everyone’s so fed up with this topic, that I feel like it, it, it is important to, to bring people a little bit of pleasure when they’re reading. They’re reading a book about, a book about patriarchy.
Tom Crowley: Well, it’s a nice light note to end on and I have to apologize again for reading one of your jokes out in front of you, which, you know, but, thank you very much, Cordelia firstly for, for joining us. It’s been great to have you here to talk about your book and it, I think it really adds to, to the discussion about it and hopefully makes you all want to read it.
and hopefully, the two of us have managed to do a decent job of making you want to read some of the others as well. So, Aruna, thanks very much for having me. And thank you all, for coming. And thanks to the Grattan Institute once again, another year of, reports that certainly, from my perspective in the media have been, a very useful sell in, in debates that, that often need some, some well framed facts.
And you can always rely on the Grattan Institute to provide those. So, thank you to all of the staff members here as well for, for your work throughout the year. It continues, to excel. and yes, thank you all for coming. Have a wonderful evening and have a lovely Christmas break full hopefully of some excellent books.